Invasive Pigments

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Transform the region’s wildly prolific plants into your own place-specific watercolor pigments with artist and invasive species connoisseur, Ellie Irons. Join Irons in an installment of her ongoing project, Invasive Pigments, where she gathers, cultivates, and processes wild and feral plant species on an intimate scale to encourage dialogue and activities for participants to experience their habitat in unexpected ways. Weeds are culturally defined for their lack of usefulness to us, but here they are useful as pigment in a representational system that marks the relationship between humans and plants within a larger ecosystem. Participants will explore the Headlands’ diverse flora while distinguishing and identifying the introduced plants that have become common in human-impacted areas, with a special eye toward those that possess the most palette building potential. Irons will share recipes from her own plant-based paint experiments, and will lead the group in making hand-mixed pigments for use in an en plein air painting session in the Headlands’ hills.

About Ellie Irons

Ellie Irons is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, who works in a variety of media—from walks, to WIFI, to gardening—to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with other earth systems. Born in rural Northern California, Irons went to college in Los Angeles, where she studied art and environmental science. After falling in love with biology field work, Irons began combining ecology with art. She relocated to New York City in 2005, and completed an MFA at Hunter College in the fall of 2009. Her recent writing has appeared in Temporary Art Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Landscape Architecture Futures.